Mixed martial arts: Not just for guys anymore

Mixed martial arts' veteran female journalist Loretta Hunt.

Photograph by: Eric Curtis
, Photo Handout

When Loretta Hunt began reporting on mixed martial arts fights in 2001, the women’s washroom at events saw all the action of an abstinence convention in Las Vegas.

Today, the sport’s veteran female journalist says she’s lucky if the lineup doesn’t snake all the way out the door.

In the fastest-growing sport in the world, women are one of the fastest-growing subsets of fans. In fact, women now represent a reported 40 per cent of Ultimate Fighting Championship enthusiasts — an enormous proportion for a firebrand organization that once claimed no interest in appealing to them.

“There’s something about watching two grown men just obliterate each other for money, and for sport, that’s extremely entertaining,” says Shannon MacDermott, 27, a fan from Sherwood Park, Alta.

“It’s not very often that you can watch people bleed and get broken and cheer for it . . . UFC allows that without any type of judgment.”

Once described by U.S. Sen. John McCain as “human cockfighting,” MMA — the athletic centrepiece of UFC — combines boxing, Muay Thai, jiu-jitsu, karate, judo, wrestling and other marital arts. And though its practitioners greatly value honour and respect — they’ll often hug after battering each other bloody — the combat sport remains the target of much tongue-clucking by the unconverted.

But even MMA’s most public torchbearer had his doubts about its mainstream appeal — particularly among women.

“It’s for males 18 to 34,” said UFC president Dana White, in a 2007 interview with the Baltimore Sun. “If women watch, that’s just gravy for us, that’s beautiful . . . But to go out and market toward women would be very expensive and not make much sense.”

Women, however, came to UFC, anyway.

And if you were to point to a Pied Piper, his name would be Georges St-Pierre.

The Quebecois welterweight champion has been voted Canadian Athlete of the Year on CTV Sportsnet every year since 2008, and is as classy outside the UFC Octagon as he is surgical inside it. It doesn’t hurt that he appears to have been forged on Mount Olympus by Zeus himself.

“Georges St-Pierre isn’t a bad-looking guy, so you’ll always get the eye-candy seekers,” says Drena Farrell, a UFC fan from Kelowna, B.C. “And it’s such a popular sport that you almost can’t help but get on board. It’s like during the (hockey) playoffs, where it’s so widespread that if you’re not involved, you get left behind.”

Indeed, UFC is now a marquee pay-per-view event, having drawn 9.3 million “buys” in 2010 alone (one-time giant WWE wrestling, by contrast, sold just two million). The UFC organization itself boasts an estimated worth topping $2 billion.

Farrell, a 35-year-old credit analyst, says her entire circle of close female friends follows the sport — one that first attracted her six years ago, when she began to get bored with boxing. She doesn’t have that complaint with UFC, which she passionately defends.

“Just because there’s a little bit of blood in UFC, people seem to think that makes it more brutal than other sports,” says Farrell. “I mean, it’s a fight. What did you think was going to happen?”

This Saturday, thousands of Canadian fans will get a cage-side view of the action as Junior dos Santos and Shane Carwin face off at UFC 131 in Vancouver. But the organization’s largest event to date was April 30 in Toronto, where some 55,000 tickets sold out in mere minutes, drawing a record gate of $11.5 million.

Among those in the mob was romance writer Vicki So, author of the forthcoming Harlequin novel Her Son’s Hero, who finds an unlikely muse in MMA fighters.

“They go into the cage knowing they could leave on a stretcher, but the stakes are worth the risk,” says So, who writes under the pseudonym Vicki Essex. “That’s what the best romances are made of: taking chances against all odds to emerge triumphant.”

So, who’s an even bigger UFC fan than her husband, admits there’s also undeniable appeal in “watching good-looking, well-muscled men wrestling each other.” But her lust for MMA is entrenched more deeply in an appreciation for the conditioning required of fighters — a number of whom she follows on Twitter.

“This isn’t a bar brawl,” says So, a 31-year-old from Toronto. “This is about skilled fighters who have total control over what they’re doing, who have trained for this.”

Jackie Maden, a married mother of two, has spent years transfixed by the sport’s twin helix of skills-mastery and machismo. So when the dedicated UFC fan encounters interlopers whose intentions are as transparent as their Lucite stilettos, let’s just say the Welcome Wagon isn’t rolled out.

“The ones who don’t have brains tend to ruin everyone else’s perception (of female fans),” says Maden, a hospital technician and writer for the website Gal’s Guide to MMA. “But there are plenty of girls I know who are interested in all aspects of the sport and don’t go to a fight just to get on camera, or to a see a guy with his shirt off getting all sweaty in the cage.”

Of course, not all women are friends of the cause — and with the ongoing UFC focus on men, that may always be the case.

Canadian MMA reporter Chris Parry isn’t “allowed” to watch the sport at home, even though he covers it as part of his job. This isn’t because of the violence, mind you, but because his wife objects to the action between blows.

“I’ll be showing her a technically brilliant fight on TV, explaining the strategy and drama, and then the round will end and the ring-girls come out in their bikinis and they’ll cut to an extreme close-up of someone’s backside,” says Parry, of Vancouver. “At that point, the eyes roll and suddenly we’re watching What Not to Wear.”

In some households, however, UFC is becoming a family affair. Journalist Hunt said it’s no longer unusual for her to see couples, and even mothers and children, enjoying UFC together.

Whether this sea-change in fandom will result in similar changes within the UFC organization is another question entirely. White has repeatedly and emphatically come out against a women’s class, suggesting it wouldn’t have enough depth and that people don’t want to see “two women beatin’ on each other.”

But Hunt, author of the forthcoming MMA book Let’s Get it On, believes White will ultimately give viewers whatever will make him more money — even if it means eating his own words.

“The big step will be getting two females into the Octagon under the UFC banner,” said Hunt. “I personally think it’s going to happen.”

In the fastest-growing sport in the world, the fastest-growing group of fans is women. Join the community at womensfightclub.com, where fans can share their love for the Octagon, read profiles of fans and the fighters, flip through photo galleries, and follow the latest MMA news and blogs from the canada.com Sports desk. You can also follow WomensFightClub on Twitter and Facebook.

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